In December 2022, The New York Times initiated a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that the companies used its copyrighted articles to train their AI models.

Recently, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang denied OpenAI's motions concerning the generation of outputs and the demand for The New York Times to prove the originality of its works.

During the proceedings, OpenAI's legal team contended that The New York Times should provide evidence of how many attempts were required to generate specific outputs with ChatGPT, but the Times' attorney argued that this was irrelevant to the copyright case.

OpenAI faced a setback when it lost a request to compel The New York Times to submit evidence of copyright infringement related to ChatGPT outputs during a conference held in Manhattan federal court.

Judge Wang raised concerns about the fairness of requiring journalists to quantify the originality of their work in comparison to external sources.

The judge permitted OpenAI to renew its request if it could specify which works were allegedly utilized for training its language models.

In response to OpenAI's requests, The New York Times agreed to provide copyright registrations and proof of contracts with authors, but argued that the requests were excessive given the volume of their published works.

Other organizations, including The Authors Guild and the Center for Investigative Reporting, have joined the legal actions against AI developers, collectively addressing discovery issues.

Both parties have been instructed to confer and report back on remaining discovery issues by September 20.

Additionally, regional newspapers owned by MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing have filed similar copyright claims against OpenAI and Microsoft as of April 2023.